The poem proper begins with a description of the seasons. Eliot quotes Ezekiel 2. The narrator, for his part, describes in another personal account —- distinct in tone, that is, from the more grandiloquent descriptions of the waste land, the seasons, and intimations of spirituality that have preceded it —- coming back late from a hyacinth garden and feeling struck by a sense of emptiness.
This fortune-teller is known across Europe for her skills with Tarot cards. Equitone, if he sees her, that Sosostris will bring the horoscope herself. The first quote refers to the area just inside the Gates of Hell; the second refers to Limbo, the first circle of Hell. Each member of the crowd keeps his eyes on his feet; the mass of men flow up a hill and down King William Street, in the financial district of London, winding up beside the Church of Saint Mary Woolnoth. The narrator sees a man he recognizes named Stetson.
He cries out to him, and it appears that the two men fought together in a war. He then asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted last year in his garden has begun to sprout. Unfortunately, she did not think to ask for everlasting youth. As a result, she is doomed to decay for years and years, and preserves herself within a jar. Having asked for something akin to eternal life, she finds that what she most wants is death. Death alone offers escape; death alone promises the end, and therefore a new beginning.
He has been careful to lay out his central theme before the first stanza has even begun: death and life are easily blurred; from death can spring life, and life in turn necessitates death. Here that surprising opening line begins to make even more sense: there is a sense of fear and uncertainty regarding the future, about what is going to grow out of the blasted land.
This can be taken metaphorically as a reference to the devastation caused by the First World War: with so many people dead in just a few years not just the millions of casualties in the war itself, but also the many millions of people who succumbed to Spanish Flu, in ; Eliot and his first wife Vivienne were both laid up by the influenza , what will the future bring?
How can a civilisation rebuild itself in the face of such drastic devastation? So many dead have been buried so quickly, through war or illness. We then have a woman speaking to us, addressing her presumed lover, recalling how her lover gave her hyacinths.
The lover replies that when they returned from the hyacinth garden, he experienced a sense of emptiness which could either be ecstatic euphoria or deadened numbness: he says he was neither living nor dead, though, suggesting that the strange feeling he experienced lay somewhere in between these two. The experience was, like many in The Waste Land , difficult for the speaker to analyse or put into words.
Another change of setting next: we find ourselves in the company of Madame Sosostris, a Tarot reader, who uses Tarot cards to try to predict the future — something that links her to the Sibyl from the epigraph to The Waste Land Sibyls were classical female figures who could prophesy the future. We leave this scene and find ourselves recognisably in London for the first time, and are told that the speaker witnessed a crowd of people flowing over London Bridge, whom death has undone.
Are these the dead? Or the living dead, whose lives have been undone by the deaths of other people — loved ones during the war, for instance? The speaker then encounters a man he knew, named Stetson. He shouts out to him, and claims they both fought at Mylae — which is quite a feat, given that this battle took place in BC during the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage.
Eliot seems to be anachronistically mixing up the modern the name Stetson, WWI and the classical or ancient Mylae, part of another war of empires fought over two millennia ago , perhaps to suggest that nothing much changes. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling.
It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed.
Marie reads for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Themes Motifs Symbols.
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